25 March surprise!

In the fullness of time, the Eternal Word, the Second Person, took our humanity into an indestructible bond with His divinity.

Today is the Feast of the Annunciation. It is nine months from Christmas.

Because of can. 1251 members of the Latin Church, usually bound to do penance on Fridays of Lent, are not bound today.

The people who put together the calendar that hangs on the walls of offices of the Roman Curia seem to have been unaware of can. 1251. You can see at the bottom of today’s page “Astinenza dalle carni”.

The feast of St Dismas falling on this day is used by some authors as proof of Dec 25 as the real date of the birth of Jesus. The theory is that in ancient Jewish hagiography, holy men lived ‘perfect’ years. The commemoration of St Dismas implies that Jesus died on March 25, which implies that his human existence, recorded in the Bible (and clear to human reason) as being from his conception, was on March 25.

I recommend writing to those organizations that make Catholic calendars and informing them of their mistake. Cite Canon 1251 in your e-mail or letter. It works!

Last year, I wrote to the Catholic Extension Society- which provides Catholic calendars for many parishes across the USA- about their mistake of putting a fish symbol on the Solemnity of Saint Joseph which fell on a Friday of Lent.
This year’s calendar does not have a fish symbol for the Solemnity of the Annunciation.

My Catholic calendar doesn’t have a fish on this day. In fact, I’m going to a wedding rehearsal tonight and the groom’s mother said that her son had the following conversation with the priest: “So, Father, we can eat meat at my wedding rehearsal because it’s the Annunciation.” “I don’t know about that. I’ll have to check with the Diocese.” “Well, there’s no fish on my calendar.”

I just learned who St. Dismas was by way of researching a Rat Pack concert from 1965 in St Louis that our local PBS was airing this week. Jimmy Hoffa financially supported the Dismas House, started by a Jesuit Fr. Clark in STL, as a halfway house for ex-cons. Fr. Clark named the apostolate after St. Dismas. Hoffa brought in the Rat Pack for a big fundraiser after Fr. Clark’s death.

Speaking of calendars:
I am in need (even at this late date) of a Catholic wall calendar for someone in the US who keeps with the ordinary calendar (but has some slight interest in things of the extrodinary form). Would anyone care to make a suggestion? Also, any suggestion for a pocket calendar or planner that includes Catholic dates pre-printed?

“There are no legal restrictions on when the Rite of Marriage may be celebrated, with the exception of the Triduum, as long as the various guidelines specific to the particular parish are respected…When a wedding coincides with a major feast the readings for that feast must be respected. Weddings during penitential seasons must respect the church tone and décor appropriate for the season.”

I have two different Catholic calendars, provided by the two competing funeral homes in my parish. Both bear the fish symbol for today. While not the most heinous crime, it does show that the people who put these calendars together are clueless about the nuances of our faith, which is sad.

I did make use of this particular provision of the law myself on Friday. It wasn’t exactly what I had planned to do, but as I was traveling that afternoon and staying that evening in mostly non-Catholic company things developed such that the relaxation of the rule was quite convenient.

Now that isn’t to say that Friday was without its Lenten character, but it was maintained in other ways this time.

When you shop…

... through Amazon, please, come here first? Enter Amazon through my search box. I'll then get a small percentage of everything you buy. (Pssst - Can't see the search box? Turn off your "ad-blocker" for this site!)

My wish lists

The horse is made ready for the day of battle, but the victory belongs to the LORD.

- Proverbs 21:31

Support them with prayer and fasting.

CLICK to buy Car Magnets & Stickers

Aedificantium enim unusquisque gladio erat accinctus.

- Nehemiah 4:18

"Let God arise! Let His enemies be scattered! Let those who hate him flee before His Holy Face!"

CLICK and say your Daily Offering!

Let us pray…

Grant unto thy Church, we beseech
Thee, O merciful God, that She, being
gathered together by the Holy Ghost, may
be in no wise troubled by attack from her
foes.
O God, who by sin art offended and by
penance pacified, mercifully regard the
prayers of Thy people making supplication
unto Thee,and turn away the scourges of
Thine anger which we deserve for our sins.
Almighty and Everlasting God, in
whose Hand are the power and the
government of every realm: look down upon
and help the Christian people that the heathen
nations who trust in the fierceness of their
own might may be crushed by the power of
thine Arm. Through our Lord Jesus Christ,
Thy Son, who liveth and reigneth with Thee
in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world
without end. R. Amen.

An outstanding opportunity to get into Latin and New Testament Greek

For Easter: another ethereal music CD from the chart-topping nuns…

Yes, Fr. Z is taking ads…

... and there will be nearly 1,000,000 page loads this month.

A bit more food for thought…

“Only one sin is nowadays severely punished: the attentive observance of the traditions of our Fathers. For that reason the good ones are thrown out of their places and brought to the desert.”

- Basil of Caesarea - ep. 243

Help Monks in Wyoming, Fr. Z, and get great coffee too!

And they have tea too!

Food For Thought

“The legalization of the termination of pregnancy is none other than the authorization given to an adult, with the approval of an established law, to take the lives of children yet unborn and thus incapable of defending themselves. It is difficult to imagine a more unjust situation, and it is very difficult to speak of obsession in a matter such as this, where we are dealing with a fundamental imperative of every good conscience — the defense of the right to life of an innocent and defenseless human being.”

- St. John Paul II

PLEASE RESPOND. Pretty pleeeease?

Should the US Bishops have us return to obligatory "meatless Fridays" during the whole year and not just during Lent?

Because you don’t know when you are going to need to move fast or get along without the supermarket…

For your consideration…

"One of the most dangerous errors is that civilization is automatically bound to increase and spread. The lesson of history is the opposite; civilization is a rarity, attained with difficulty and easily lost. The normal state of humanity is barbarism, just as the normal surface of the planet is salt water. Land looms large in our imagination and civilization in history books, only because sea and savagery are to us less interesting."

- C.S. Lewis

Identity theft is a serious problem that you do NOT want to have. I use Lifelock.

And for your cybersecurity…

Wyoming Catholic College!

A great place in Rome…

More food for thought:

“I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.”

Check out the Cardinal Newman Society feed!

Be a “Zed-Head”!

Fr. Z’s stuff is everywhere

More food for thought…

"All laws which are repugnant to the Constitution are null and void."

- Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137, 176

Even More Food For Thought

"Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties:
1. Those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes.
2. Those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe, although not the most wise depositary of the public interests."

Additional Food For Thought

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Fathers, you don’t know who might show up! It could be a “big fish” of one sort or other…

And... GO TO CONFESSION!

Leave Voice Mail for Fr. Z

Nota bene: I do not answer these numbers or this Skype address. You won't get me "live". I check for messages regularly.

Help the Sisters. They have a building project. Get great soap (gifts, etc.) while helping REAL nuns!

Food For Thought

“Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites. . . . Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”

Archives

ENTRY CALENDAR

Do you use my blog often? Is it helpful to you?

If so, please consider subscribing to send a monthly donation. That way I have steady income I can plan on, and you wind up regularly on my list of benefactors for whom I pray and for whom I periodically say Holy Mass.

Some options

The opinions expressed on this blog do not necessarily reflect the positions of any of the Church's entities with which I am involved. They are my own.